Many early computer programs were written in a relatively haphazard manner. As a result, many of these programs can be very difficult to understand due to the complexity and lack of structure of the underlying code, which is often referred to as “spaghetti code” due to this unstructured complexity.
Such unstructured computer programs rarely have any reliable explanatory documentation. Further, the original developers of these computer programs are typically no longer available for consultation. Understandably, the maintenance, modification, and porting of such computer programs is, as a result, particularly difficult.
Over the years, a huge investment has been made in such computer programs that are often used in critical operations or applications, often referred to in this context as “legacy applications”. These legacy applications have earned the trust and confidence of their users for the simple reason that they operate as expected.
The owners of legacy computer applications increasingly wish to port their applications to new computing environments, especially if existing computing environments are no longer supported at the hardware or operating system level. The transition of such applications to new computing environments is usually preferred, compared to other possible options, such as re-writing the relevant application. However, there is often little if any adequate supporting documentation that might assist in making this transition. Consequently, the task of porting the legacy application to a new platform can be an unpredictable and expensive undertaking when manually performed.
Accordingly, a need clearly exists for an improved manner of restructuring computer programs that at least attempts to address one or more existing limitations of the prior art.